pairs of chapters to each of three corresponding geographical scales of intimate spatialization. It takes up the scalar analytics of Lila Ellen Gray, who notes of fado that a “sentimentalizing aesthetic” and representations of place “echo a geopolitical strategy of scale” through which the state produces a “cartography of both the enormous and the miniature, where social and geo-spatial structures of intimacy and interiority (of neighborhood, of family, of faith) symbolically st[an]d in for the expansive reach of the nation and the imperial, corporate, totalitarian state” (2014, 113). Expanding the scope of ethnographic research to scales well beyond the state, this book similarly examines the structuring of musical intimacy, social danger, and racializing affect within and through the nation-state in three interconnected scales of spatialization: the transnational and diasporic, the regional and urban, and the proximate space of ritual and bodily contact. The progressive contraction from “enormous” to “miniature” geography (and from more elaborate to more ingrained forms of meaning into which musical affect transgresses) foregrounds important histories of tambura’s transnational movement at the book’s outset. It also deliberately cuts across the grain of standard analytic narratives of intimacy as a quality of local, face-to-face interaction that may then spiral outward into larger spaces. Instead I posit intimacy as intrinsically spatialized and spatializing at multiple levels of scale and examine its role in small and large ensembles, thereby representing the range of ensemble types while also considering how intimacy accrues and is mobilized within different scales of human organization.
This introduction and the following chapter elaborate the history of the STD “Pajo Kolarić” and related city and professional ensembles and examine the work of musical and affective responses to danger in generating and blocking narratives of race and mobility since the Yugoslav-Croatian conflicts. Chapter 1 focuses on “Pajo Kolarić’s” youth orchestras, tracing further their musical travels into militarized and demilitarized zones and abroad after the outbreak of war in 1991. Connecting wartime concerns over neighborhood, family, and faith to both emergent narratives of national awakening and affective experiences of danger, the chapter takes up affective block in its less disruptive sense of tambura ensembles generating new blocks of becoming (affectively shoring up the public disavowal of Yugoslav identification). It also begins to examine affective block in its second instance: the curtailing of certain counternarratives via the intensities of musicking in sites of racialized fear and danger as ensembles (re) connected Croatia’s intimates to the country’s core territory.
Two subsequent chapters address the capacity for affective responses, in turn, to be blocked through strategic or incidental discursive maneuvers. They examine music as a spatializing and socializing force (Krims 2007) that brings diverse populations into contested territories and racialized sentiments at the level of urban centers (Pittsburgh and Osijek) and the regional territorial assemblages in which these cities’ tamburaši most often perform (the American Rust Belt and Eastern Croatia). These assemblages are neither geographically static nor culturally monolithic, despite discourses of racial difference that suggest otherwise. In order to demonstrate these discourses’ spatializing power over and simultaneous susceptibility to material processes of physical urban relation and the tactility of tambura technique, these chapters examine discursive responses to the sensational knowledge (Hahn 2007) of racialized becoming. Chapter 2 analyzes Pittsburgh’s semiprofessional bands in relation to local Croatian Homes’ junior tamburitzans ensembles and to professional musicians from the former Yugoslavia. Taking up questions of sincere feeling, it examines bands’ staging of jokes and humorous musico-textual translations as an anti-affective strategy. It shows how this block to affect privileges meanings of racial difference but also produces residual feelings of Otherness, shoring up whiteness as a form of limitative minoritarian becoming in the face of intimate contact and even conflict among Croatian, Serbian, Romani, and African American residents. In contrast, chapter 3 examines limitations of discursive strategies in staving off such feelings. Turning to Roma bands in Croatia and how they delimit practices among Croat bands and the orchestras and folklore ensembles with which they train, it argues that bands and orchestras that play dangerously risk transgressing a postwar Croatian aesthetic for the musically “clean” and adopting the “dirty” technique of Romani musicians. The inaccessibility of this feat both blocks (delimits) affective states that Croatian musicians might otherwise hold in common with racialized others and blocks (delimits) discursive counters to constructs of Roma as nonthreatening nomads and of Serbian presence as a dangerous incursion on East Croatian territory.
Two final chapters consider ideologies of belonging and intimacy and their co-delimitation of physical human relations as felt and embodied in the space and time of musical ritual. They build upon previous chapters by addressing tensions that emerge within racialized groups (thus narrowing the scope) but that concretize around distinctions of gender and religion, which themselves often intersect with race-thinking and -feeling. They thus bring into focus the internalization of power structures that at times contradict dominant orders of inclusion and exclusion, demonstrating new possibilities for blocking chauvinistic ideologies in delimitation through socially, intercorporeally, and even supersensorially distributed affect. Turning to the all-women band Garavuše and to both male and female fans of male (semi)professional groups, chapter 4 examines the particular gendered relations of (semi)professional bands25 and their audiences. It demonstrates how physical blocks (of both affect and assembled human bodies) can successfully mobilize to counter restrictive ideologies, arguing that performances have their own structures of power that draw on racialized dynamics of performative interaction. These structures simultaneously threaten musical intimacy with a block of intense aggression and build affectively on the intimate nature of threat itself. Chapter 5 returns to questions of faith introduced in chapter 1, analyzing supposedly fixed hierarchies among the officiators of Catholic-oriented tambura services (typically priests), the mostly adult orchestras/folklore ensembles that perform for them, and those in attendance. It also returns to affect and meaning’s cogenerative dialectic, examining how the slippage and potential blockage between sensorial and ideological understandings of space allow musical worshippers a flexibility to move beyond structures of architecture and dogma. The chapter thus delineates the ways in which hierarchies are jeopardized or reinforced through musical performance, the affective intensity of which often relies on a para-Christian metaphysics of space and energy and on participants’ mutual physical constitution of Croatia as a racially musicked nation and core territory.
ONE
Tamburaši and “Sacral Buildings” on a Balkanizing Peninsula
The tambura is silent now, the rifle tells the tale.
Radovan Milanov and Antun Nikolić, “Tell the World the Truth about Baranja”
Spring 2010: Drinking tea in a moderately lit, below-ground café in Osijek, I mentioned to Antun (president of the STD “Pajo Kolarić”) the existence of a youth Farkaš tambura orchestra in Ruse, Bulgaria.1 I knew from visiting Ruse in 2009 that its leaders were seeking additional international collaborations, and Antun suggested the possibility of the “Pajo Kolarić” children’s orchestra traveling to Bulgaria. Several parents, however, expressed “fear” at the prospect of sending their children to Bulgaria. Antun attributed this reaction to concern about the musicians’ young age. Yet one of the orchestra’s directors told me that she, too, felt “fear” at the thought of leaving Croatia for unknown countries. All were happy to welcome the Bulgarians if they came to Osijek. However, anxiety over travel to proximate foreign territories among this generation of young adults (who had been children or youths during the war) was strong enough to prevent a trip to Bulgaria, despite the “Pajo Kolarić” orchestras having recently
